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Ah, I'm a woman that's been clear around the world in my rocking chair, and I tell you we all get surprises now and then.

Eudora Welty

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Eudora Welty
Age: 102 †
Born: 1909
Born: April 13
Died: 2011
Died: July 23
Author
Autobiographer
Literary Critic
Novelist
Photographer
Writer
Jackson
Mississippi
Eudora Alice Welty
Chair
Chairs
Surprise
Clear
Woman
Tell
Around
Rocking
World
Surprises

More quotes by Eudora Welty

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All good writers speak in honest voices and tell the truth.
Eudora Welty
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What I do in the writing of any character is to try to enter into the mind, heart and skin of a human being who is not myself. It is the act of a writer's imagination that I set the most high.
Eudora Welty
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A thing is incredible, if ever, only after it is told -- returned to the world it came out of.
Eudora Welty
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To open up the new, to look back on the old may bring forth like discoveries in the practice of art.
Eudora Welty
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Characters take on life sometimes by luck, but I suspect it is when you can write more entirely out of yourself, inside the skin, heart, mind, and soul of a person who is not yourself, that a character becomes in his own right another human being on the page.
Eudora Welty
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Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.
Eudora Welty
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The challenge to writers today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage. Whatever our theme in writing, it is old and tried. Whatever our place, it has been visited by the stranger, it will never be new again. It is only the vision that can be new but that is enough.
Eudora Welty
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There's still a strange moment with every book when I move from the position of writer to the position of reader and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cold public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I'd gotten sunburned.
Eudora Welty
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My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice.
Eudora Welty
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What we know about writing the novel is the novel.
Eudora Welty
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If you haven't surprised yourself, you haven't written.
Eudora Welty
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Beware of a man with manners.
Eudora Welty
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To imagine yourself inside another person...is what a story writer does in every piece of work it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.
Eudora Welty
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Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.
Eudora Welty
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For the night was not impartial. No, the night loved some more than others, served some more than others.
Eudora Welty
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Never think you've seen the last of anything.
Eudora Welty
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No blur of inexactness, no cloud of vagueness, is allowable in good writing from the first seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady lucidity and uncompromise of purpose.
Eudora Welty
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Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else ... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?
Eudora Welty
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Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.
Eudora Welty
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Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.
Eudora Welty